You’ll be gripped… Grace’s emotional detachment throughout will give you chills’ Rated 5 stars by COSMOPOLITAN

How To Kill Your Family follows Grace who is on a mission to get rid of the family who wronged her and take their fortune. However, she is currently serving time for a murder that she did not commit. I don’t need to like characters but it helps to engage with them if there are some nuances to their personalities. I didn’t get that with this novel. Having killed off six people — a few of them in gruesome circumstances in a sauna or a sex club — Grace shows little remorse. Even people who had nothing to do with her father’s treatment of her and her mother got bumped off simply because they are heirs to the fortune she believes is rightly hers. The novel has also seen pre-empts from dtv in Germany and Saida de Emergencia in Portugal and selling at auction to Pamela Dorman at Pamela Dorman Books/Viking in the US. French rights (Julliard) and Serbian rights (Vulkan) have also been sold, while conversations with other foreign publishers are ongoing. If now I can't even trust a nice pink cover with a girl and a shovel, I don't know what I can trust anymore. Yes, this book is truly in a league of its own. It's chilling and disturbing; yet, also LOL humorous.i was attracted to this book bc of the anti-heroine promise as i love an unlikeable, morally grey female character - but grace as a character was far too muddled, and it was clear that the author still hadn’t fully fleshed her out. she was clearly meant to be a character in the vein of villanelle from ‘killing eve’, but she was nowhere near as interesting or compelling It started off with a good idea. A girl who wants revenge on her family and kills them all but ends up being put in jail for a murder she did not commit. The idea was there. The execution was not. i thought it was going to follow the protagonist plotting all the different murders - but that was barely focused on at all. instead of focusing on the story/plot, the protagonist goes on irrelevant rants about social/cultural observations which were clearly made by the author e.g. there was a big passage about the dangers of smart devices and smart homes. if the author wanted to write about these observations, why didn’t she just write an essay collection??? Casale added: “Every few hours I suddenly remember that Harriet is my editor and Viking is my publisher and it’s not just an amazing daydream. Harriet’s pitch captured everything I want this novel to be; from the start, she and the whole wonderful Viking team have embraced me and the women in the book with all the solidarity that lies at the heart of the story. I can’t imagine better partners in bringing the book to readers and hopefully becoming one more voice in the fight to change the endemic nature of male violence against women and girls. The ending broke my heart a little, but I didn’t feel like it affected my enjoyment of the book at all. In fact, I found myself racing to the end to digest all the information.

Grace has a plan in life: revenge. I'm not here to criticise that, her father is awful and her family are all assholes; you go, girl! But good revenge needs a smart way to be accomplished. We meet Grace in prison. But as rings true throughout the novel as a whole, she is there for reasons we later discover are far more complicated than would be contained in a straightforward murder – arrest – imprisonment plot. I spent my 20s enjoying journalism but also knowing ‘I have slightly stumbled into this’. I knew lots of journalists, my dad was a journalist. I did it without thinking about it. And then I thought, ‘I don’t really know where I’m gonna go with this, because I’m not my dad ...’” She left journalism aged 33, to write Jog On and says that writing the book “felt like the beginning of my life”.

Fiction

The story follows Grace’s plan to kill her family, for crimes committed against both her mother and herself. I didn’t find the reasoning for the vendetta totally compelling, but as the book progressed, I felt it actually didn’t matter. It was really fun following her process - doing the research, plotting the death and then carrying it out. It’s not always straightforward (it would be a dull story if it was) but it’s quite the wild ride.

Addictive… Grace Bernard is one of the most intriguing and bewitching protagonists I've read in years’ EMMA GANNON There's no two ways about it, Grace, the protagonist of this story isn't a nice person. And yet, I still found myself really liking her as a character. She is brutally honest, incredibly vengeful and darkly comical and we as the reader get front row seats to her innermost thoughts and feelings told through her life story written while serving time in prison for a crime she, ironically, didn't actually commit. I thought the premise was fantastic and I really enjoyed reading as Grace executed her cunning plans as well as her musings on all manner of subjects including wealth, class and even influencers. The narrative is generally really sharp and clever although at times Grace's story is interrupted by the present day so at times I could understand why people found this to be a bit of a ramble. I didn't actually mind this as it felt more realistic for me personally. After all, whose thoughts are ever organised?One thing is when you expect something from a book and then you realize that's not going to happen, another story is when the book is also outrageously bad.